


Where You Start

by glorious_spoon



Category: CSI: NY
Genre: Child Abuse, Drug Use, Gen, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 21:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/944790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even when you get away, it's hard to leave some things behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where You Start

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing explicit, but this story does contain oblique references to sexual and physical abuse.

Phoenix, Arizona. 1985.  
  
She hugs him, and he clings to her sweater with both hands, knowing in some deep, inexplicable way that it's not safe to let go. She smells like perfume and iodine, and her face is a troll's face, swollen and mottled. Her hair tickles his nose.  
  
"You take care of your sister for me, okay?"  
  
He nods and burrows closer, pressing himself into her fragile warmth. The monster is gone, for now, but there's something monstrous about his mother all the same, some hollow darkness that has nothing to do with her battered face or her hands, which are warm and strong and merciless as she pries his fingers away.  
  
"Let me come with you," he blurts, and bites his lip. He knows what the answer will be even before she shakes her head.  
  
She doesn't look at him as she kisses Shelly's cheek and rises, lifts her suitcase and turns on graceless feet to walk away from her children and into the night.

* * *

He lines his pens up in a row across the top of his desk, one blue, two black, one purple (from Stella, for his birthday), three highlighters (all pink, arranged in descending order of newness).  
  
Sometimes they get moved, and he has to line them up again, one by one, pen by pen, one precise inch from the edge of the desk. He unplugs his computer when he isn't using it, pushes his chair in, arranges the wheels so that they form a perfect square on the tile floor.  
  
If anybody at the labs notices, they don't say a word.

* * *

Phoenix, Arizona. 1991.  
  
"Checkmate."  
  
"No fair."  
  
"Yes, fair. You want to play again?"  
  
"This is a stupid game."  
  
"Come on, just one more."  
  
"Adam, when's Daddy gonna be home?"  
  
He pauses, begins to set up the molded plastic pawns on his side of the board, careful to place each one in the precise center of its little printed square. Across the table, Shelly watches him out of wary hazel eyes. The neck of her t-shirt is too big, and he can see fading yellow bruises in the shape of five thick fingers pressed into her shoulder. Courtesy of Dad, before he disappeared three days ago.  
  
They're playing by the light of a battery-operated camp lantern that casts icy beams of light across the scarred surface of the table. Outside, the hot desert moon is sinking below the rim of the sky, and most likely Adam's going to have to be late for school again to drop Shelly off. She keeps saying that she can walk herself, but he's not going to let her. Not in this neighborhood.  
  
She's waiting for him to lie. She's only ten, and she's waiting for him to lie.  
  
"Soon," Adam says, obliging her. "Don't worry, Shel. He'll be home soon."

* * *

He finds control where he can, in the precision of keystrokes and the whirring comfort of his high-tech gadgets. He likes machines. They're predictable.  
  
He likes people, too, but they're less predictable and sometimes they still scare him. When Mac storms into his lab and starts shouting, he can feel tension rolling up his spine, knotting his shoulders and tightening his throat, the old reaction that makes him flush and stammer like he's still fourteen.  
  
After Mac leaves, Stella squeezes his shoulder comfortingly and stalks out, face like a thundercloud. Under his desk, Adam grips his knees hard with both hands and counts slowly backward from a hundred.  
  
He's twenty-nine years old. This is his job. Mac is his boss, and he's a good man.  
  
It still takes him until thirteen to stop shaking.

* * *

Phoenix, Arizona. 1994.  
  
"Where d'you think you're going?"  
  
The voice cuts through the music on his headphones and he freezes, slides them off. Kurt Cobain's tinny voice drifts up to his ears as his father shuffles into the kitchen, unshaven and bleary-eyed. An old bear, grizzled and slow-moving but still dangerous.  
  
"I asked you a question, boy."  
  
Boy. It's always  _boy_ , now. Shelly still has a name in this house, but she's smart enough to be somewhere else, most of the time.  
  
"I just wanted a soda," he says, hating the sound of his voice. Obsequious. He learned that word in English class last week, and he doesn't want to apply it to himself. Especially not now, now that he's sixteen and almost as tall as his father.  
  
His father, who snorts and crosses the kitchen, yanks open the refrigerator door and pulls out a fresh bottle of beer. " _I just wanted a soda,_ " he mimics, twisting the cap off the bottle with a vicious jerk. "You sleep under my roof, you eat my food, you don't contribute a goddamn  _thing--"_  
  
He chugs from the bottle and then suddenly, violently, hurls it across the room. Adam ducks, but it misses him by a mile anyway, shattering against the window frame and spewing foam across the worn linoleum floor.  
  
"I was--I was studying," he tells his feet.  
  
"Studying," his father sneers, opening another bottle of beer. "Where's your sister?"  
  
Staying at Annie Durham's house, the same place she's been every night this week. When their father is home Shelly tries not to be, and Adam can't blame her even if that does leave him with Dad's undivided attention. At least he only gets hit.   
  
"I don't know," he says out loud and wonders if he's going to have to explain another black eye to the school nurse tomorrow.  
  
His father grunts. Then, finally, jerks his chin at the puddle of beer and broken glass littering the kitchen floor. "Clean that up."   
  
Beer in hand, he slouches back into the living room. Adam sighs and starts looking for the broom.

* * *

His hands heal slowly enough to make typing a real pain. Lindsay does most of it now. Everyone is being so nice that he wants to scream.  
  
"I'm really, honestly fine," he tells Hawkes, who has cornered him in the locker room halfway through changing into his street clothes. "All bandaged and medicated and everything."  
  
"You are not fine," Hawkes retorts mildly, and continues unwrapping the bandages on his hands. "You should change these more often, let them breathe a little."  
  
"Yeah, uh, I know. Ow." He does know about these kinds of burns, only too well. You'd think that would have been enough to keep his mouth shut back in that warehouse, but he's never been the stoic type.  
  
"Sorry. Let me see your other hand."  
  
Adam extends his left hand and Hawkes turns it over in his gentle doctor's hands, and then stops. At first, Adam doesn't understand why, and then he follows Hawkes' gaze to the cluster of scars buried near his armpit, where the flesh is pale and soft. They're not visible when he has a shirt on, and even his undershirt hides them fairly well.  
  
Cigarette burns leave distinctive scars, and Hawkes has been a doctor long enough to recognize them. There's another cluster of them under his other arm, and a few dotted across the insides of his thighs. They're old. His father quit smoking when he was twelve.  
  
"Adam."  
  
"I--" Instinctively, he pulls back, but Hawkes is still holding onto his wrist. He tries to smile, but his mouth feels frozen and he has a feeling it comes out lopsided.  
  
"Adam. Look at me."  
  
Adam finally looks up. There's a terrible sadness in Hawkes' dark eyes, and Adam hates to be the cause of it. "They're old," he manages, and looks away again.  
  
He's expecting a question, or an explosion, or some kind of--something. Hawkes just sighs and begins re-wrapping the bandages, gentler than ever.

* * *

  
Berkeley, California. 1996.

She's curled up against his dorm room door when he gets back from class, too-thick eye makeup streaked down her cheeks, oversized duffel bag in her lap. Her lip is split and she's shaking like a junkie, but when she looks up at him her eyes are fierce.

Oh, no. "Shel--Shelly, what happened?"

Like he doesn't know. A girl he recognizes vaguely from the dorm meetings passes them in the hallway and gives him such a dirty look that he knows what she must be thinking. He ignores her.

Angrily, Shelly rubs a hand over her eyes. They're still leaking tears, but her voice is steady. "Can I stay here a couple of days?"

He has three midterms coming up, no extra bed, and a roommate who's almost definitely not going to be cool with Adam's baby sister crashing here. Not that any of that matters.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, of course you can. What happened?"

Shelly shrugs with one shoulder but lets him help her up. Her shirt is too tight and her skirt is short enough to show bruises on her thighs. Her hair is in a high, tight ponytail and she has on pink acrylic nails that look like claws. She's only fifteen, but she could pass for twenty-five, easy. Adam thinks that's mostly the ancient look in her eyes, under the layers of mascara.

"You kind of look like a raccoon," he says, unlocking the door.

She shrugs her duffel bag--Dad's old duffel bag from his Army days, it looks like--onto the floor, puts her hands on her hips, and looks around. "God, you're such an obsessive neat-freak."

Adam smiles, tucking his books into their places on the shelf over his desk. "I guess you don't need to ask which side is mine."

"Not so much." She crosses the room and drops onto his bed, carelessly mussing the perfect lines of the comforter. "So, how's class?"

"It's great. Really, like, completely awesome," Adam says. Then, for the third time, "Shelly, what happened?"

She shrugs again, looks away. "Dad caught me coming out of the women's clinic. Flipped out. Figured I should lay low for a while."

The cold slithery something that's been twisting in the pit of his stomach since he first walked in and saw her freezes abruptly into a hard lump. "What, uh--"

Stops, breathes in deeply. He doesn't need to ask that. Shelly glances back at him with the same sharp, glittery smirk she tosses at Dad all the time. "I was sucking off the gynecologist like the little tramp that I am."

Adam flinches. "Shel--"

"Sorry." She looks down, picks at the fringe on her denim skirt. "I had some things to take care of, okay?"

Things. He was here taking freshman seminar while Shelly was back in Phoenix taking care of  _things._  

"I'm sorry," he says after a couple of minutes.

"Yeah, whatever." She kicks her heels off and props her bare feet up on his pillow. "So, tell me about school."

* * *

She doesn't call when the center releases her, but he comes outside one Monday after his shift to find her waiting on a bench, smoking a cigarette and watching traffic, and he stops so short that Stella almost runs into him. 

"Adam?" she says, but Adam's watching his sister unfold gracefully to her feet. She looks exhausted and too thin, but her eyes are clear and sober and her clothes are clean, no sign of the unhealthy, jittery energy that cocaine always left her with. He has to clear his throat three times before he can speak.

"Hey, Shel."

A smile tugs her lips up, and for a minute she looks so like the old pictures of their mother that it's like staring at a ghost. Then it turns into a full-on grin and it's just his baby sister, standing there on a New York City street. Clean and sane and alive. "Hey. So, they sprung me."

"Yeah," Adam says, and he's grinning too, stupidly wide. "Yeah, I can tell. You, uh--you need a place to crash?"

"Nah," she says. "Got an apartment. It's a dump, but it'll do for now. You can buy me dinner, though."

"Okay," Adam says. "Okay, yeah. I can do that."

He's completely forgotten that Stella's there until she steps up beside him, quirks an eyebrow. "Adam?"

"Stella," he says. He seriously can't stop smiling. "Stella, I'd like you to meet my sister."


End file.
